Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Hamburger Empire Strikes Back

Yesterday was a good day of workouts. I had a 3 - 5 mile easy run on the schedule so I hit the pathway around the river over lunch for it. I'd already decided I was going for 5 miles. The wind was pretty crazy, but the sunshine was nice. Here are the details:

Mile 1: 9:43

Mile 2: 9:54 (in to some serious wind)

Mile 3: 9:30

Mile 4: 9:24

Mile 5: 9:22

Not too badly played out, eh? I find running and semi-paying attention to my heart rate is an interesting thing. I'm running faster than I used to, and my heart rate is telling me it is easy. Sometimes you mentally wonder if you should pull back, but the heart rate tells you that you can keep it up. So I ran 5 miles at a pace that I used to consider race pace, it felt like I could have kept going, and I never felt the urge to stop and walk once.

I also got in a swim last night. I needed to get in to work early today so that made going to my swim clinic a near impossibility. I met up with a friend for dinner, but when we were finished by 7:30 I started thinking that I didn't need to bail on swimming altogether, but that I could go at night instead. I had a burger for dinner...which in hindsight if I would have thought about swimming after dinner I would have not had that burger... But I went home, let it digest for a bit, then showed up at the Y at 8:45. There were only two lanes set up, one slow and one med/fast. The slow lane had a couple of people lolly gagging around in it and the medium lane had a few breaststrokers in it. Once I settled in it wound up being myself, another front crawler and one breaststroker. I had to pass the breaststroker more than a few times and in an attempt to avoid a head on collision with the front crawler I got a few moments of sprinting in. I didn't want to do a workout, I just wanted to swim 2000 m to see how it felt and how fast I was. How fast? Well, I am a bit faster than when I was swimming straight laps back in July and August. And endurance-wise I was able to swim the 2000 m with no problems other than just swimming back and forth is kind of boring. But otherwise how did it feel? Ugh, I kept burping burger... My friend asked is I had a hamburger empire strikes back moment at the strainer...which thankfully...no... But note to self - burgers and swimming are a bad combination!